small office file server

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Nick

I'm looking to build a file server for my small office (currently only 2-3
employees) I don't need anyhting too massive right now but it could be asked
to doa lot of thing in the next 6 to 12 months, so I'd go a little overboard
now then have to rebuild later.

do I really need to go with an opteron? (which are pretty pricy) or can I
juse use an athlon X2 or even high end athlon 64? I'm going to have at leas
1GB of RAM, most likely 2GB. going to have a raid array (RAID 0) for backup
purposes. this is just being used to serve up commently used files right now
but will eventually be used to:

host our website
possibly an exchange server
DHCP server
possibly an Asterisk server
and who knows what else

thanks!
 
I'm looking to build a file server for my small office (currently only 2-3
employees) I don't need anyhting too massive right now but it could be asked
to doa lot of thing in the next 6 to 12 months, so I'd go a little overboard
now then have to rebuild later.

do I really need to go with an opteron? (which are pretty pricy) or can I
juse use an athlon X2 or even high end athlon 64? I'm going to have at leas
1GB of RAM, most likely 2GB. going to have a raid array (RAID 0) for backup
purposes. this is just being used to serve up commently used files right now
but will eventually be used to:

host our website
possibly an exchange server
DHCP server
possibly an Asterisk server
and who knows what else
Click to expand...
File servers based on the proper OS don't require much at all for CPU
power. I've still got a 486 running novell file and print server. An
Opteron, or even an old P1 is like buying a Jumbo Jet to send a letter
cross-country.

Web, mail, ftp, dhcp servers also require minimum cpu usage unless you
have thousands of clients with thousands of hits per minute. Ditto for the
rest with the exception of possibly Asterisk. While it may not require a
lot of cpu power I think I'd want a seperate Asterisk server simply
because of the loss of phone service should it run into a problem from all
the other uses you may have on it. But that's just my opinion. You could
easily put all in a $200 PC and have 95% cpu power to spare. Put your
money where it's needed, ram, storage, and backup. Now if you're also
going to be using this as a workstation.....
 
going to have a raid array (RAID 0) for backup
I think you mean RAID 1, two disks mirrored.


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I'm looking to build a file server for my small office (currently only 2-3
employees) I don't need anyhting too massive right now but it could be asked
to doa lot of thing in the next 6 to 12 months, so I'd go a little overboard
now then have to rebuild later.

do I really need to go with an opteron? (which are pretty pricy) or can I
juse use an athlon X2 or even high end athlon 64? I'm going to have at leas
1GB of RAM, most likely 2GB. going to have a raid array (RAID 0) for backup
purposes. this is just being used to serve up commently used files right now
but will eventually be used to:

host our website
possibly an exchange server
DHCP server
possibly an Asterisk server
and who knows what else

thanks!
Click to expand...

An Athlon64 is fine, you don't need an Opteron. The Nforce4 (for socket
939) and Nforce 5xx (for socket AM2, this is the new Athlon 64 that
supports DDR2) have on board RAID controllers and dual gigabit ethernet
controllers so they have everything you need for a file server. You
probably should get a low end dual core like the A64 X2 3800+, they're
pretty cheap and they'll give you a lot of headroom for the future. An MSI
K9N with an AM2 X2 3800+ or X2 4000+ would be a good choice.

However don't buy anything today if you can afford to wait a month. Intel
is coming out with their new processor on July 24 and AMD has timed big
price decreases to correspond with Intel's release.
 
Nick said:
I'm looking to build a file server for my small office (currently only 2-3
employees) I don't need anyhting too massive right now but it could be asked
to doa lot of thing in the next 6 to 12 months, so I'd go a little overboard
now then have to rebuild later.

do I really need to go with an opteron? (which are pretty pricy) or can I
juse use an athlon X2 or even high end athlon 64? I'm going to have at leas
1GB of RAM, most likely 2GB. going to have a raid array (RAID 0) for backup
purposes. this is just being used to serve up commently used files right now
but will eventually be used to:

host our website
possibly an exchange server
DHCP server
possibly an Asterisk server
and who knows what else

thanks!
Click to expand...


Almost no CPU is required for a small office server.

With the current AMD price reductions, an Athlon 64 3000+ socket 939 on
a Asus A8N-VM CSM with 2 x 512 mb PC 3200 memory would be more than
adequate. It has built in video and supports SATA II and RAID 1. IIRC,
that mb also has gigabit LAN would would be helpful. Its not the only
solution and I only mention it as an example of some features that might
be desirable as a basic system used for a small office server.

For most offices, 120 gig of shared disk space is big overkill. A lot
of motherboard support RAID 1 mirroring of either IDE or SATA. Modern
drives with long warranties make a lot of sense for RAID 1.

We run a server in our home that probably gets more traffic than a small
office. Its a video / movie server to two HTPCs and does file sharing
across six computers. Its running a Sempron 64 2600 socket 754 with
half a gig of PC 3200 DDR, 2 x 320 gb (1 SATA, 1 IDE) and 1 x 250 gb
hard drives, no RAID. Motherboard is MSI RS-480 with buint in video.
420w power supply and DVD RW.

O/S is XP home.

Runs very cool. Never a glitch.
 
General said:
An Athlon64 is fine, you don't need an Opteron. The Nforce4 (for socket
939) and Nforce 5xx (for socket AM2, this is the new Athlon 64 that
supports DDR2) have on board RAID controllers and dual gigabit ethernet
controllers so they have everything you need for a file server. You
probably should get a low end dual core like the A64 X2 3800+, they're
pretty cheap and they'll give you a lot of headroom for the future. An MSI
K9N with an AM2 X2 3800+ or X2 4000+ would be a good choice.

However don't buy anything today if you can afford to wait a month. Intel
is coming out with their new processor on July 24 and AMD has timed big
price decreases to correspond with Intel's release.
Click to expand...

Wacha gonna do with a dual core processor? For a file server? Mail
server? Print server, even with large documents (printers are
remarkably slow)?

Its WAY too much overkill. As a combined file server, print server,
mail server, all that CPU power is wasted on a small office even if it
expands from 2 to 20 employees. A socket 939 Ath 64 3000+ is plenty of
power. What is necessary is the ability to manage a couple of mid-sized
hard drives in RAID 1. Video can be integrated onto the motherboard
since a server doesn't need a powerful video card. Gigabit LAN is a
useful feature for a file server, but most files in a small office are
small and transfer quickly over a 100mb LAN.

More important are the access controls. These don't take much CPU
either but are needed, especially if remote access is going to
eventually be required.
 
Nick said:
I'm looking to build a file server for my small office (currently only 2-3
employees) I don't need anyhting too massive right now but it could be asked
to doa lot of thing in the next 6 to 12 months, so I'd go a little overboard
now then have to rebuild later.

do I really need to go with an opteron? (which are pretty pricy) or can I
juse use an athlon X2 or even high end athlon 64? I'm going to have at leas
1GB of RAM, most likely 2GB. going to have a raid array (RAID 0) for backup
purposes. this is just being used to serve up commently used files right now
but will eventually be used to:

host our website
possibly an exchange server
DHCP server
possibly an Asterisk server
and who knows what else

thanks!
Click to expand...

The two most important parts of a file server is the amount of ram and
the speed of the hard drive subsystem. I heard that Google used to
run their huge database engine off of a bunch of Pentium Pro computers.
You can skimp on everything else in the system except these two items:
lots of ram and a good fast IO HD subsystem. You only need these if
you have a lot of people "hitting" the computer otherwise, the cheapest
new computer you can find will probably handle the load.

later......

PS. You can never have too much speed or too much ram. (Hackers
percpective).
 
Nick said:
I'm looking to build a file server for my small office (currently only 2-3
employees) I don't need anyhting too massive right now but it could be
asked to doa lot of thing in the next 6 to 12 months, so I'd go a little
overboard now then have to rebuild later.

do I really need to go with an opteron? (which are pretty pricy) or can I
juse use an athlon X2 or even high end athlon 64? I'm going to have at
leas 1GB of RAM, most likely 2GB. going to have a raid array (RAID 0) for
backup purposes. this is just being used to serve up commently used files
right now but will eventually be used to:

host our website
possibly an exchange server
DHCP server
possibly an Asterisk server
and who knows what else

thanks!
Click to expand...
If you plan to use Win XP as the server OS, be aware that it has a limit of
10 simultaneous TCP connexions. There is a patch on the net, which raises
this limit. However, if you want to use an original OS, consider Linux.
 
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